Across America, drugstores have sold out of surgical masks. Schools have closed, sports games have been called off, and doctors’ offices — and their phone lines — are jammed. The truly anxious confess that they are trying to avoid touching elevator buttons, library books and the knobs on bathroom sinks.

As the number of confirmed swine flu cases in the United States continued to rise to more than 100 on Thursday, precautions over the illness — many of which appeared to be overreactions — were beginning to affect the daily lives of tens of thousands of people, even in states where the flu has yet to be found.

In interviews from Boston to San Francisco, some people said they faced a troubling, often internal balancing act over an illness no one seems to know much about: How, given alarming expressions like “imminent pandemic,” to keep their families safe (Should we cancel that play date?) without succumbing to measures that might only breed more fear (What would people think if we wore masks?).

In Cold Spring, Minn., Diane McDonald and her two children had grown ill. McDonald was panic-stricken, and called her doctor, who reassured her that her family’s symptoms did not match those of swine flu.

“You’re always out trying to protect your babies,” McDonald, 34, said, “and when you’ve got these scary things like this stupid pandemic of swine flu, you kind of want to duct-tape your windows and shut your house off to the world.”

In some places, doctors said they had been overwhelmed with patients, some of whom insistently sought tests for swine flu though they showed nothing of the fever and cough consistent with it.

“They’re coming without any symptoms; they just want to be checked,” said Ana Marengo, a spokeswoman for the Health and Hospitals Corp., which operates the public hospitals of New York City. “It’s definitely crowding all our emergency rooms.”

In New York, where 49 cases have been confirmed and 16 more were suspected, some hospitals have reported healthy people — the “worried well” — returning from vacation in Mexico and going straight from the airport to the emergency room.

More than 300 schools closed around the country, sending more than 170,000 students home in 11 states, including all schools in the Fort Worth, Texas, district.

At Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, 22 students who had been student teaching in Mexico were told not to take part in graduation ceremonies.

Not everyone concerned. In some places, people seemed perplexed at the thought that anyone would change their behavior given the relatively small number of confirmed cases in the United States.

The vast range of responses to the outbreak was precisely what had left some people, they said, torn. Some complained bitterly about the news media’s “over-hyping” of the matter.

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